other things
Here are a few stories this week I think you should take a closer look at:
Mark Cuban debuts online pharmacy for low-cost generics
Everybody loves a billionaire behaving well. Okay, well that statement isn’t entirely true. Nevertheless, Mark Cuban got quite a bit of good PR this week for his online pharmacy for low-cost generics. Health insurance in America is one of the country’s greatest embarrassments, and too few companies seem to be working on how to find hope for patients in a broken system.
Notably, the startup, Cost Plus Drug Company, was already working on this goal before Cuban slapped his name on the company and gave it funding, but that’s a pretty standard Silicon Valley story, and his involvement has certainly brought more attention to the company’s much-lauded efforts. “I want to be above breakeven while maximizing the number of people who can afford their medications,” Cuban told TechCrunch. “Shoot. I would be happy if we can make a little, but push pricing of generics sold elsewhere down significantly.”
Apple updates ‘Personal Safety User Guide’ with AirTags guidance
We’ve talked about how AirTags are already showing signs of growing into a massive safety debacle for Apple. This week, the company aimed to showcase the safeguards they’ve been trying to install to protect users. There isn’t anything new in this guide for the most part.
Apple has been positioning its messaging as though it introduced a solution to a problem that already existed, but Tile and other tracker companies were operating on a laughably smaller scale than Apple, which has 1.8 billion iOS devices in the wild which can act as beacons for AirTags — that’s a level of scale that’s not even on the same planet as what other operators offered.
Y Combinator’s founders start an exclusive crypto club
I’ve been focusing a lot of my time on tracking the crypto sector — a space that’s been a lot of fun to cover because it’s so damn controversial. This week, I wrote about Orange DAO, an exclusive crypto investment group that you can only become a member of if you were previously a member of the Y Combinator accelerator.
“It’s crazy to think about an alumni group that becomes its own entity that is for-profit and generates wealth for its members, but that’s exactly the state of the world we’re in,” the DAO’s co-founder Ben Huh told TechCrunch in an interview. “We think that these groups will serve as a buying power as well as validation… So, if 1,000 YC alumni choose a specific service provider or toolset to use, it must mean that it’s actually quite good because these people build for a living.”
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